


Stardust

by Chromi



Series: Take My Breath Away [Tumblr SFW Prompt Fills] [4]
Category: One Piece
Genre: Childhood Memories, Childhood Trauma, Dreams and Nightmares, Established Relationship, Imagery, M/M, NaNoWriMo 2020, Oh btw this is NOT about Marineford, Prompt Fill, just so that's clear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-28
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:53:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,461
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27758710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromi/pseuds/Chromi
Summary: “You were flames,” Deuce breathes after a pause, squeezing Ace’s hand in his, “and I was nothing.”
Relationships: Masked Deuce & Portgas D. Ace, Masked Deuce/Portgas D. Ace
Series: Take My Breath Away [Tumblr SFW Prompt Fills] [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2017327
Comments: 8
Kudos: 31





	Stardust

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt "⌘: being picked up" on tumblr!
> 
> I'll admit I haven't proofread it yet, I've just written it and am spring-boarding back into bed for a nap ✌ sorry for any mistakes! I'll correct them later.

Hands reach up, grasping at air, for the comfort he seeks with no real belief that it will come. It never comes these days no matter how loud he screams, how much he sobs, how he makes himself sick sometimes from the stress the misery puts on his body. He suffers, alone, as he always does now, reaching and reaching and hoping that this time will be the time that someone comes for him.

He is three, and he is helpless. Paralyzed by nightmares, the memory of the ghost that swooped in and cackled manically still ringing in his ears, he cries for his mother.

She does not come.

His pillow is dragged down into his arms, cradled against him to become soaked in anguish under a sheet adorned with stars. He has nothing else of comfort on his bed, no plush animals or dolls or anything one might imagine to find on the bed of a child so young. There is only him— only him and his mind, forced to cope alone clutching the pillow that, if he buries his face in deep enough, _believes_ hard enough, still smells of her.

She will not come back. He does not know why, but Father had said so, and Father is never wrong.

She will not come back to wipe his tears or soothe his fears, kissing his forehead and enveloping him in warm cuddles and that smell of flowers that he now aches for.

The boy’s head hurts, his face aches, his throat burns with the mourning of loss more so than the fear of the nightmare that woke him. He can’t understand why she would leave him to fight this alone; why she kissed both of his cheeks when she thought he was asleep one night not long ago, stroking his pale hair with a loving touch that had sent him back off to sleep again. On waking the next morning, she had not been at breakfast, nor had she sung to him as she changed him from pajamas to summer shorts, playing _This Little Piggy_ with his toes before the socks came to swallow his feet whole.

He thought she might have been crying that night, perhaps having had a nightmare of her own.

He never got the chance to ask her.

He never had the chance to do much of anything, once Father put a stop to the questions.

Once Father shouted at him, spittle flying, rage prompting the vein in his temple to raise and his face to color puce.

_Do not speak of her again. Do not whimper, boy, and do not look so damn pitiful. She is gone, and you will forget her with time._

And Father was always right. Her face was fading in her son’s mind, becoming fuzzy in its details and distorted in shape. The harder he tries to picture her now – using the memory of her as a guiding light to bring him back out of the darkness – the fainter she seems, the harder it becomes to remember her voice.

But that light – brilliantly white, like a star too near yet too far – becomes orange, becomes less like starlight from a picture book and more like the flames that leap and crackle on the logs in the hearth downstairs. It builds, and it swirls, and it rages into something _real_ and tangible for the boy, becoming reality rather than vision.

On reaching out again – this time making contact with something _more_ than the air, the emptiness in which he lies – it is warm. It is comforting in ways that she was not, yet stills his breath, makes his tears sparkle on his cheeks.

Arms of fire and flames that don’t burn (that he knows, without knowing _how_ he knows, would never harm him) scoop him up out of his bed, rocking him. A voice so jarringly unlike hers whispers for him to calm, spinning promises of comfort and a lifetime of dedicated love for him. _You’re having a nightmare_ , the flames sing, dance, project the information into his mind rather than aurally communicating. _You’re asleep, sweetheart. Wake up. Everything’s okay._

He’s loved by the flames; finds something more than simple relief for the sorrow and a temporary balm for the loss. It isn’t her, but it’s _his,_ whatever it is. It is care and it is love; it is passion and it is the ferocity of a burning sun all rolled into one cuddle that he never wants to end.

And so he grasps it back, pressing his face to it’s core. Learns of heat unlike anything else, that which is fire but not, a raging inferno that blazes in a cyclone down into a smoldering flash of a kiss to his cheek, marking him as belonging to it.

_Wake up, baby. You’re dreaming._

Maybe he wants to keep dreaming, if dreaming brings him this.

Maybe if dreaming allows him sanctuary from horror and loss, then to dream should be to live.

The flames burn brighter, lighting up the world around the little boy. Brighter, more brilliant, climbing higher into the sky and cascading in a whirl below them until all is consumed by fire, burning and burning and everything he can think of and see and taste, consuming him, letting it stifle until he spasms with a choke—

—And Deuce wakes with his face pressed into his pillow, struggling to breathe, the sheets twisted around him like the arms of a being he’s now only half-remembering as the world shifts gears and refocuses.

“Are you awake now?”

It’s Ace beside him, a hand to his head, fingers too-warm and running through his hair. He looks at Deuce not with pity or sympathy through the gloom of the night, but with interest, like he’s fascinating.

“I don’t know,” Deuce says thickly into the pillow, wide-eyed and staring as if to blink is to lose Ace to the encroaching night. “Am I?” For he thought he had been before – he had been three, he had been in bed back at the mansion and he had been crying, crying, _crying—_

And then Ace is untangling him from the sheets, no reaction betraying how he feels about them being drenched in sweat. Perhaps he doesn’t even notice.

“What were you dreaming about?”

But it has already become little more than a panicked sensation of splinters of emotion, ones that he can’t define and can’t attribute to anything sane or whole. He recalls loss as if it alone is carved into each cell that makes him; he puts a hand to his forehead when he sits up, trails fingers to his neck to feel the racing pulse thundering there, the last hint pointing to terror. That, and how his hair is damp, clinging to the tops of his hunched shoulders.

But when he looks up into silver-gray eyes – into a galaxy of stars that span Ace’s face, burning in the night air—something clicks into place faster than the rest of it fades.

“You,” Deuce says like he has always been intending to say it. “I was dreaming of you.”

_I dreamed of fire lifting me from my bed. Of flames cauterizing the hole in my heart left by—_

— _Who?_

He frowns, leaning into the palm cupping his jaw, thumbing his cheek. He knows he was heartbroken beyond mere grief at the loss of someone important, but they are gone along with the dream, forgotten in light of reality building a picture of Ace leaning in, concerned.

“But you were crying,” Ace gently presses, his forehead warm to his own, “you were sobbing like your heart was breaking.”

Ace’s hand is in his before he can explain that it hadn’t been because of Ace, but rather that Ace had been the one to shut all of that down again. When he does get those words out through a throat constricted with sadness that he doesn’t understand, Ace is quiet, thoughtful, breathing in time with him.

“You were flames,” Deuce breathes after a pause, squeezing Ace’s hand in his, “and I was nothing.”

Just stardust. Just a memory of a boy trapped in his own mind.

“Well,” Ace says slowly, and Deuce can feel the frown pulling his brows down against his own skin, “now that you’re awake, that means you’re everything, right?”

Did it work like that?

Deuce huffs a laugh, and Ace mirrors him perfectly.

“That’s my attempt at being poetic,” Ace clarifies.

“I like it.” And he means it.

If he is everything, then it is because Ace made him so, rescuing a little boy from the past to become who sits beside him today.

Deuce doesn’t mind that the dream’s landscape is lost to him. It can’t have been that important, surely.

**Author's Note:**

> I love chatting, so feel free to send me a message on either [Tumblr](https://chromiwrites.tumblr.com/) or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/Chromiwrites)! I'm always open to requests and chatting about these guys!


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